This news won't shock many parents: Having a kid puts a sudden, drastic strain on a marriage, according to new research from the University of Denver.
For 90 percent of couples, marital bliss dives within a year after the birth of their first child.
But don't assume staying childless is the secret to making a marriage happier over the long haul.
The eight-year study of 218 Denver-area couples found that while those who had a child experienced an immediate dip in marital satisfaction, couples who did not also became less happy — just gradually.
Couples who were the most romantic before children got the "biggest jolt at baby time," said Scott Stanley, a DU psychology professor. Couples who had babies right away, thin a year or so of getting married, and couples with lower incomes also had more substantial drops in marital satisfaction.
"Declines are somewhat normal in marriage," Stanley said. "For those having children, they are going to be more concentrated around the time that you have children."
What the study doesn't capture: the richer, longer-lasting contentment that comes with building a family, he said.
"While there is a strain on the marriage from having children, a lot of couples gain this sort of deeper thing that you are growing as a family," said Stanley, author of "Fighting for Your Marriage."
Proof of that, perhaps, is that the divorce rate is slightly lower among couples with kids.
The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is significant because it followed couples for eight years, going deeper than many previous studies and "refining" prior research, said Jay Belsky, director of the Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues at Birkbeck, University of London.
Much of the prior research linking decreased marital happiness to children compared parents with nonparents, who typically don't have a lot in common anyway. The DU study, done with Texas A&M University, followed couples beginning before the birth of their first child.
The research included 134 couples who had kids and 86 who did not.
The couples were videotaped discussing a recent problem or argument. Psychologists analyzed the videos, noting when the husband or wife refused to talk, refused to let the other person talk, yelled or denied wrongdoing.
People involved in the study also had to answer yearly questionnaires about their marriages, including rating their happiness on a scale of 1 to 7.
"The take-away message is probably that for the average couple, having a child is a strain on the relationship," said Brian Doss, a professor at Texas A&M.
A piece of advice from the researchers: Don't be surprised when a marriage loses some happiness over time.
The research also showed steeper declines in happiness if the mother's parents were divorced, if the couple lived together before marriage and if the first baby was a girl.
One theory about the girl factor is that couples tend to struggle more when they have a daughter because the father gets less involved in child care.
Source: University of Denver
